PC Game Review :: Singles - Flirt up your Life Demo

PC Game Review :: Singles - Flirt up your Life Demo
Posted :: Jun 6, 2004 by Impact

Produced by Rotobee Realtime 3d
Full Game Release Date: May 24, 2004

Introduction:
For all of those that thought The Sims didn't put enough emphasis on relationships, Singles - Flirt up your Life might just be for you! The graphics are better, the 3d engine more robust, and most of the emphasis is on building a relationship with the other person you are living with.

Computer Specs (Impact):

Processor: AMD XP2100+ cooled by a Koolance Water-Cooling System
Memory: 512M DDR PC3200
Motherboard: ABIT NF7-S with onboard 10/100 LAN
Sound Card: Creative Labs Sound Blaster 5.1 Live!
Power Supply: Antec 350 Watts "SL350"
Primary Monitor: Generic 17" CRT
Speakers: Altec Lansing 5.1
Video Card: 64mb Geforce4 TI4200
Hard Drive 1: Western Digital 80gb (8mb Cache)
Hard Drive 2/3: 2x Western Digital 80gb (8mb Cache) Striped in RAID-0
DVD-RW: Sony 8x
CD-RW: 52x24x52x
Operating System: Windows XP Professional w/SP1

Main Thoughts:
If you are not familiar with The Sims, now would be a good time to read our review on it. This review will compare The Sims and Singles - Flirt up your Life quite a bit. The main focus of Singles is to build a good relationship with the other person you are living with. This means you must talk, spend time together, and get to know each other. In the demo you are stuck in a small apartment with 2 people of your choice (choose them as the game starts). Your choices include a few men and a few women, each with a short profile about the person. The graphics engine in Singles is far superior to the graphics engine in The Sims. Singles allows you to rotate the camera, zoom in and out, and slide the camera through a full 3d house. This allows you to get right up close to the action and see your character's every move. As you go through the demo, your singles gain skill points by doing different things. Just as in The Sims, they are able to gain skill by doing a particular action (fixing a broken toilet will raise their ability to fix things, cooking helps their cooking skill). You can also help raise their skills by using skill points you earn in one of many categories (see screen shots). While I am not completely sure what warrants a skill point, they were fairly easy to come by. To create a better relationship with the other single you are living with, you must use four menus to communicate (see screen shots). As you talked to each other, your relationship with the person (in that category) went up and allowed new options to be used. An example of this is: At the start of the game, all you can do under the "Sensuality" menu was "Flirt". After a few days of talking and flirting you were able to use more options like "French Kiss", and "Cuddle". You could rate your progress in each category by the menu showing bubbles that would fill as you progressed. Now don't get the idea that all you do is talk to each other. There are still other issues, just like in The Sims, you have meters rating your characters needs. These change just like in The Sims. You must use the bathroom, take showers, brush your teeth, eat,and sleep to live. You are also supposed to go to your job every morning at 9:00... When I played I didn't see a reason to, your boss never seemed to get mad... This allowed me more time to work on my Singles relationships. I played the game for about 2 hours and was able to get a fairly good relationship going. By the end of the first hour however I was using the "Warp Speed" button (there are four speeds to control how fast things go) quite a bit.